Robert Walters, 2024

Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering, North Carolina State University 1984 
M.S., Mechanical Engineering, North Carolina State University 1978
B.S. degree in Nuclear Engineering, North Carolina State University 1977

Upon completion of his Ph.D. he worked at the NASA Langley Research Center as a Research Associate of the National Research Council. In 1985, Dr. Walters joined the faculty of the Aerospace and Ocean Engineering department at Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor. He served as Professor and Department Head of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering from 2002 to 2006 when he became the Associate Vice President for Research. In May, 2007 Dr. Walters took over the responsibilities of Vice President for Research at Virginia Tech. until he retired in 2015.

In 2013, Dr. Walters was inducted into North Carolina State University’s inaugural class of the Hall of Fame. Dr. Walters has also received an IBM Supercomputing Award, a NASA Certificate of Recognition and a NASA Group Achievement Award among many others. He is the former chairman of the Aerospace Department Chairs Association and is an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He has also served as Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal, chair of the AIAA Ethics committee and has served on numerous other professional society committees including the Aeronautics committee for the National Academy of Engineering. 

In 1988, Dr. Walters founded AeroSoft, Inc., a company that specializes in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software development and applications. Located at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, the company supports the computational simulation needs of a wide range of government, industry and academic customers using state-of-theart CFD software. Ten years after the formation of AeroSoft, Dr. Walters sold the company to employees.

One of Dr. Walters primary research areas has been computational fluid dynamics with a focus on algorithm research. His contributions to the literature include: hypersonic flow, algorithm research for Navier-Stokes simulations, characteristic–based methods, unstructured grid and flow solution algorithms, multi-zone methods and preconditioning techniques among other topics. For the past 15 years, Dr. Walters has been working on stochastic fluid mechanics with an emphasis on probabilistic-based, spectral polynomial chaos techniques.